Inventory Woes

[Ophannus]

Our inventories and mog sacks are bursting at the seams! With the new expansion on its way we NEED more inventory! With the recent partition upgrade of PS2 and the huge decrease of population, it couldn't possibly burden the server to upgrade our inventories as it would years ago. More room for new stuff/job equipment please!!

[RAIST]

. . .

Might be time to review your hoarde to see if you really need all that stuff you're toting around. Perhaps you need to take advantage of some storage options (NPC, moogle slips) or sell some things off?. Got 10 jobs to 99 (all have at least Empy +1 armors, some have full AF1 and a few relic pieces, stashed Nyzul weapons, 30 some odd magian weapons--including full set of SMN staves, etc.), 6 more jobs at 51 with some job specific gears (like a host of bard instruments and swap set for songs),and stashed feet armors and accessories from Aby in case I decide to take some of those past 51. Yet, while hunting Lumbering Lambert yesterday for a trial, I walked away with 27 Ram horns (to level bonecraft) and just over 1 stack of lanolin cubes (to NPC to help buy mats for crafting the horns)--all this on NIN that has a host of weapons and tools at it's disposal for various situations that may come up both in and out of abyssea.

Just saying....I'm a bit of a hoarder myself and can relate to the problem, yet I was able to run around with 30 free slots available. If you take a close look at what you actually use on a regular basis....you may find you can stash a lot of stuff out of the way temporarily for future use--or possibly even sell them off.

Oh, and no.... I DON'T have a mule. Never have.

[Ophannus]

Okay but for players that actually like to utilize good gear for their jobs: i.e PDT/MDT sets for various jobs, fast cast sets, haste sets,nuking,enhancing,cure potency,ws gear magian staves, idle gear(regen/refresh) various weapons for proc'ing red/blue, elemental obi, teleport rings/earrings,exp ring,moogle slips,ammunitions,food. They can't just keep introducing dozens to hundreds of new items every few months and not increase our inventory. We have the same inventory space now as we did in 2007 but there are thousands of more items. We need some more relief.

[RAIST]

Just how much more do you need?

You can have up to almost 400 slots to store items already, then there's over a dozen other places you can store items as well through various NPC's/moogle slips. They have already stated they are looking into possibly adding a new container--it's not too far fetched to expect that to happen with the new expansion, as they have a history of introducing such things with an expansion. Besides, you typically won't be carrying all that stuff in your active inventory at once---the unneeded pieces can be stored in satchel/sack, or possibly even be left in safe/locker/storage depending on your plans for your play session. For instance, I have a set I like to use on BLM and WHM specifically for Campaign/Besieged use sometimes--I don't have to tote any of that gear for doing physical damage around when I'm doing non-campaign/besieged activity.

If you're asking for more than 80 per container, for now you're likely S.O.L due to limitations in the base code inherited from the PS2 that SE insists on maintaining across all clients. This is not conjecture, it was confirmed by SE to be an issue a long time ago, and the claim was vetted by people who poke around in this code all the time (think the actual limit was actually 83 or something, more than 80 but not 85). With a little creative tweaking and cutbacks elsewhere in the UI/background processes they MIGHT be able to bump it to 85 without too much impact, but they are not willing to make those trade-offs.

That is the problem with the legacy support at this point....many matters cannot be enhanced/introduced because of SE's insistence on extending legacy issues across all platforms to keep development and play "balanced". Until SE changes their position on this issue and starts rewriting core code...need to be a little more vigilant on inventory management if you are wanting to hoarde all that situational stuff. For instance, might have to sacrifice mog decorating for a Panatiere and a couple more pieces to cap your storage container with as few pieces in your safe container as possible. Get moogle slips and store all the abby gear for the jobs you rarely use anymore. Make more sensible choices in gear that you carry based on what you plan to be doing... Somewhere, somehow, common sense needs to prevail.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

You can have up to almost 400 slots to store items already

Which is all well and good except only 80 of the are the main inventory.

You can hand us 1001 ways to store stuff but it's irrelevant when you can't hold enough gear that you can equip in a macro especially when SE are so intent on adding situational gear, include into that you also have to make sure to keep at least ~10 spaces empty for items from NMs/Voidwatch etc or risk losing an item you actually want and you've got a massive problem.

As for the issue with no more than 80 spaces no doubt that could have been changed with the UI update coming, the likelihood is they can't up PS2 so they wont up PC.

[RAIST]

Which is all well and good except only 80 of the are the main inventory.

You can hand us 1001 ways to store stuff but it's irrelevant when you can't hold enough gear that you can equip in a macro especially when SE are so intent on adding situational gear, include into that you also have to make sure to keep at least ~10 spaces empty for items from NMs/Voidwatch etc or risk losing an item you actually want and you've got a massive problem.

As for the issue with no more than 80 spaces no doubt that could have been changed with the UI update coming, the likelihood is they can't up PS2 so they wont up PC.

Actually, if you throw in the 80 for your active inventory, that's up to 480.... the 400 was for STORAGE ONLY (I know that technically, it's a few slots less because you have to put in a few furniture pieces to make 80 storage, but it's 480 total slots available for sticking an item somewhere).

And, in a legit macro, you can only equip one item per line, and there aren't even 80 equipment slots, much less more than 80....so, don't know where you're coming from on that line about being able to hold enough gear to equip in a macro.

The point is, people might need to consider paring down your active inventory to accomodate what you need to have on you for your swaps. Even on NIN, with all my tools, situational gear, my 6 katanas (made some elemental ones) extra weapons for procing with (I actually keep my a full set of elemental staves in Sack for use with crafting and such, warp stick which can be used to proc club and such), various situational sets for evasion, haste, WS, damage taken items, even a few pieces for +enmity (up to +10) I can pull in---I STILL manage to have up to 8 slots free in main inventory, and over 20 free in sack. A similar thing happens with my SMN--I have a full set of -perp staves, plus a Pet MAB staff, AND a cure potency staff, EMPY armor, a few AF pieces, some other situational armors used for whether I am using Favor, buff/physical/magical BP's, a swap for curing to enhance cure potency, swap sets for Weapon Skills (that include gorgets), AND a Heal MP set. And yet.....I still have managed to keep about 20 slots open for items that drop. The trick is I found some items that can fulfill multiple roles for those situations, so I may carry one item that fills 3 needs. Granted, at times I may only have 5 slots open in active inventory, but that just means you periodically need to swap stuff into sack/satchel is all.

Do the research, and be aware of when you are capping things like evasion/accuracy or Damage Taken and such...know when adding more stats is not going to benefit you considerably enough to warrant the loss of space and make wiser gear/item choices for the task at hand. For example....don't carry mp food/gear pieces ON YOU when you are going out as NIN/WAR for the night. Don't need echo drops in main inventory if you aren't in danger of getting silenced, don't need a MDT set in main inventory if you aren't in danger of getting nuked to death, etc. You don't HAVE to tote around stuff you aren't going to be using tonight ...it isn't rocket science, just need to take some time to think it through.

IT CAN be managed IF---and this may well be the problem---IF people are willing to take the time and form a plan.

[Ophannus]

That is the problem with the legacy support at this point....many matters cannot be enhanced/introduced because of SE's insistence on extending legacy issues across all platforms to keep development and play "balanced".

They recently just expanded the partition for PS2's FFXI usage by like 20GB.

[RAIST]

They recently just expanded the partition for PS2's FFXI usage by like 20GB.

That has nothing to do with the constraints on memory usage that are forcing these restrictions. PS2 only has 32 MB of memory to work with---it doesn't get to take advantage additional memory space with even something like EMM386 (used to exceed a "soft" memory limit in the old days), nor virtual memory, so everything has to fit within a hard 32MB memory space that is continually streamed/refreshed. That includes everything on your screen, some stuff that is not on your screen (like the map for the entire zone loads into memory, data about mobs/characters out to the edge of your field of vision, all background scripting, the lists of your inventory when you pull it up, and so and so and so forth). Windows uses more memory because of various things like larger texture sizes, the wrapper and such, and it also can hold on to more recently used assets in resident memory simply because it has more to spare and can also sluff off less frequently used memory into the VM pool on the hard drive and such....but for the PS2, the registers are limited to a 32MB address space and that is all it can use at any given point in time. That is why there are "hard" restrictions encoded like some lists can only hold 256 items and such. This is also why inventory is limited to 80 items...in order to sort items when viewing your inventory and additional container like sack/satchel/storage/safe/locker, it has to be able handle the two containers plus temp items plus a buffer for doing the sorting. Otherwise, they would have to do away with the ability to sort in some screens (or come up with a smarter way to sort that didn't require such a large temp buffer).

These kinds of limits are embedded in a lower level of the engine where all these placeholders are reserved prior to use (something you have to do in some environments, you reserve a memory space for a container before you populate that container with data...kinda like you partition a hard drive before you can save files to it) and SE is unwilling to go back and rewrite a completely different set of rules specific to each individual platform---they are designed to the least robust platform on the list, that being the PS2, and the other platforms run a wrapper of sorts to use that code in their environments. This way, (in some aspects) SE just has to worry about tweaking the one core set of code (based on PS2 operation), and then a sort of translation layer for each system that remains more or less static (like DirectX, POL.exe and ffxi's DLL's, etc.). So you see....they have to go back to ground zero to change some of this stuff, and those things can't be changed because the PS2 is not capable of handling that change...and thus we are left with the old "PS2 limitations" excuse.